When ecommerce merchants build relationships with customers in an authentic and committed way, that’s true loyalty.
This was the one of the main messages that came from a panel at the recent MACH US Roadshow in New York. For the panel, Bold Commerce Co-Founder Jay Myers was joined on stage by Eli Finkelshteyn, Founder and CEO of Constructor, and Holly Hall, Manager of MACH Alliance to speak about customer loyalty.
When asked to elaborate more on the ideal strategic approach to foster loyalty between brands and customers, Myers re-iterated a key point he brought up in the panel: “composable commerce is crucial to offering a unified experience, everywhere you interact with customers, to create and maintain their loyalty”.
What is Composable Commerce?
Composable or MACH commerce refers to an architecture that supports best-of-breed tools to help build ecommerce solutions. Previously, most online merchants and enterprises relied on legacy systems made up of monolithic suites.
The MACH approach “lets you own the customer relationship and you’re not limited by any method or platform telling you this is how you should interact with them,” Myers stresses.
Greater flexibility is available to brands who opt for a MACH approach. “You can move your tech stack around, and you can ‘own’ a particular part of that stack. For example, once you have Bold Checkout, you own it, whether you shift your overall platform from, say, Magento to Commercetools. Many brands like having that kind of control.”
Creating Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty isn’t always easy to come by, and Myers has noticed how some brands take a skewed approach to cementing that trust with customers. “Too many brands have a carrot and bait style relationship with their customers. Such as ‘do this thing to get that reward, buy this thing to earn these points, etc.’ but brands simply need to create reasons customers find immense value in their relationship, and build and monetize a program around it.”
His point echoes several figures on the importance of cementing that loyalty. According to Bold Commerce’s report on subscription trends, 57% of brands that offer loyalty programs reported an average customer lifetime of a year or more, while only 35% of brands without a loyalty program reported the same average customer lifetime.
Also, new product discoverability is made easier with loyal customers. Research results from Invesp Consulting found that existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more compared to new customers.
Building Loyalty With Subscriptions
With a composable approach within the subscription space, where membership loyalty is paramount, giving customers an optimal shopping experience is the cornerstone to building trust, Myers says. Finding the ideal tools to add to the tech stack to better understand customers through their shopping habits, right down to their preferred payment method, will tell shoppers the brand is putting in effort to learn more about them and ease any friction in their buying journey.
What was often discussed in the MACH US Roadshow panel was creating a strong relationship with customers, and Myers adds later how an emotion or persona can be created through how a brand interacts with customers. Or even in how they present themselves in the wider market they play in.
Look at a subscription brand such as Liquid Death, which simply sells water in cans. Myers notes that the brand is associated with edgy underground culture, where its name is often synonymous with heavy metal concerts. “People can identify with Liquid Death in a way they might not identify with Dasani,” Myers says.
To showcase another brand example, Bold Commerce has spoken to Metabolic Meals, a meal delivery service based in St. Louis and operating across the US, where they opened up about a key strategy for subscription brands: Leverage member data and personalization.
Metabolic Meals sells 30 new items every week, and they pay attention to what customers favor and lean towards. They’ll scour through nutritional data of a customer’s orders to better understand if, say, they are more calorie conscious or prefer a low-carb diet. Then they can better tailor the subscription experience to those buyer personas.
Myers says brands should come back to answer this question again and again: “How are you showing you are listening to your customers and are you personalizing the experience to give them a digital home to come back to?”
Want to learn how to deliver more revenue with composable commerce? Get instant access to these panels of Bold Commerce at NRF 2023 by clicking below.
- Topics:
- MACH
